Rerun: The Artemis Program

to the Moon. Because the Office of the Inspector General, a department within NASA, conducted an audit and discovered that there is really no way NASA is going to have space suits ready for a twenty twenty four return to the Moon. That was the proposed deadline. We are not going to make that. According to the audit, the earliest those space suits would be ready with be sometime in

the spring of twenty twenty five. So according to that, and that's just one piece, obviously, of a very complicated series of pieces necessary for us to return to space, we're not going to be back on the Moon by twenty twenty four, which even at the you know, when I recorded the episode last year, I thought was an

incredibly aggressive target in the first place. So I thought it would be good to go back and listen to that episode about the Artemis project and to understand what the parameters are, what the purpose is, and then at the end I'll talk a little bit more about space suits. So let's get to it today. We're going to talk about space and NASA's most recent program intended to put American astronauts back on the Moon and eventually to go beyond the Moon. But first let's do a wick look

back into the history of the space program. So back in the early nineteen sixties, the United States was in a fierce competition with the then Soviet Union. The Soviets had shocked Americans upon the launch of the satellite Sputnik that was the first man made object launched into orbit around the Earth. Sputnik didn't really do a whole lot other than send out a little beep of a radio signal as it traveled miles above the Earth's surface, but

the implications of that launch were enormous. First, the fact that the Soviets could launch an object into orbit suggested that the USSR also had the capability of launching, say, you know, a missile somewhere else, like across the world at the United States. Coupled with a nuclear warhead. That

was a chilling thought. The US and the USSR held a great deal of animal aimosity for each other, which is putting it lightly, or at least the governments of those countries did, and each government supported an awful lot of propaganda aimed at vilifying the other side. As a child of the eighties, I remember a lot of sort of anti Soviet, anti Russian kind of messaging in pop

culture and beyond well. Anyway, the second part of this is that the world is a stage, as Shakespeare once wrote, and on that stage, the Soviets were poised to take on the role of most technologically and scientifically advanced nation on the planet. And that was something that the US government wasn't too keen on either, and so there was a very strong incentive to give the US space industry its own shot in the arm to catch up and

then ultimately to pass the Soviet space program. The space race would showcase the best and worst of human traits. Among the best were ingenuity, problems, solving, collaboration, exploration, and curiosity.

Among the worst, you had pride, you had boasting not to mention the fact that the finish line kept getting pushed back whenever one side would achieve something notable, like you might say, oh, well, really, the real test is to put the first person up in space, And then the Soviets did that, and the Americans said, well, really, the real test is docking two spacecraft in space together.

And then the Americans did that, and the Soviets said, well, really it's and so they kept pushing that back until finally it got to the real goal isn't to put something into orbit, but to get to the moon, and that was viewed as the ultimate goal, the ultimate finish line. Now, I mean, for reals, a lot of the space race was really just about moving those goal posts so that one side could not easily declare victory and superiority over the other side. And yes, it is more than a

little bit childish. It might remind you of kids playing a game where they keep changing the rules whenever it seems like they're losing. However, that childish desire is also what helped drive and perhaps more importantly, fund, the actual engineering and science that would lead to some of the greatest achievements in human history. These are achievements that would spin off numerous beneficial technologies that we rely upon and

benefit from. Today anyway. In nineteen sixty three, the US Space Agency NASA initiated a new program named Apollo, and this was an official response to a promise that had been made in nineteen sixty one by US President John F. Kennedy. He announced a commitment to get astronauts to the Moon by the end of that decade. Now, in Greek mythology,

Apollo is the son of Zeus. He's the god of the arts, of poetry, and of the Sun. The Apollo missions saw several successful moon landings, beginning with Apollo eleven in July nineteen sixty nine, an ending with Apollo seventeen in December nineteen seventy two. The program also had its share of tragedy. In nineteen sixty seven, three astronauts died in a pre flight test when a fire broke out

in the cockpit of the command module. NASA would later designate this mission, originally known as Apollo two oh four, Apollo one, in an effort to honor the three astronauts who lost their lives in this accident. Apollo seventeen would mark the last time a human would set foot on the Moon, and that stands true up to the date

of this recording. No human has been back to the Moon since December nineteen seventy two, and that's what brings us to today's topic, because once again NASA and numerous partnering companies and organizations are looking to send people back to the Moon's surface. This time, the goal is to include women astronauts in the project, something that just didn't happen back in the sixty and seventies. The new program is called Artemis. Now, like Apollo, the name Artemis comes

to us from Greek mythology. She's actually Apollo's twin sister, which makes sense. This is sort of the twin Sister project to Apollo. Now. Frankly, I would argue Artemis is much better suited as a name for this project because she's the goddess of the Moon. She's also the goddess of the wilderness and hunting and other stuff. The Greek gods were famous multitaskers. As goddess of the Moon, she does have the perfect name for the NASA endeavor to

put people up there. She did not just spring into being, either in mythology or in the space project. In space terms, Artemis follows some earlier attempts to get astronauts back to the Moon. She's sort of the evolution of some earlier programs that have since been either canceled or just transformed. So this means we need to look at a span of time between the Apollo mission and the upcoming Artemis missions. In the first decade of the twenty first century, NASA

announced a program called Constellation. The scope of Constellation was pretty darn big. It laid out the many advances NASA identified as being pivotal for the most extensive missions to the Moon and beyond. It called for the retirement of the Space Shuttle program. It was already on its way out, and so the reason for that was that the Space Shuttle program was limited in its ability. Really could only go into orbit. It can't go to the Moon or beyond.

And also the Columbia disaster had brought up serious questions about the viability of the Space Shuttle program in general,

it was an aging fleet of spacecraft. So this particular Constellation program laid out requirements for a new type of spacecraft called Orion, also known as the Crew Exploration Vehicle, and it's similar to the old Apollo CAP but it's actually larger and has a lot more features and could support a crew of astronauts on a mission to the Moon and back, or extended trips to the International Space Station. I'll talk more about the Orion in detail a little

bit later. So the Constellation program, in turn, was a response to a call from the US President, George W. Bush, and he was asking NASA to really shoot for these goals. He wanted something really aspirational and inspirational to kind of get people excited about this. Presidents tend to do this, by the way, when they need a kind of a boost in their own popularity. It's great that we benefit from it from a scientific perspective, but it does not

always come from a genuine desire to push science. Sometimes that desire is more linked to the politics of the situation than the actual scientific goal of the situation. And in fact, there are plenty of people who argued that this whole approach was not the right thing for NASA to do, that putting people back on the Moon didn't really solve any big issues or didn't open up any

other opportunities. We had already been to the Moon. People were arguing that maybe we wouldn't be able to learn anything new by going back to the Moon, that we should instead dedicate our efforts toward other things. But the Moon is one of those things that's easy to point at and say that is a big challenge. How do we get back there? And then you can worry about the other stuff later on down the line. I think

that there is value going back to the Moon. By the way, I don't want to dismiss it out of hand, but I can see the validity of arguments that state maybe we should look at other goals instead, goals that might have a more obvious payout in either the benefits we get from technological advancement or the directors of the missions themselves. So I could see both sides of both arguments, and so I haven't I guess I haven't really fully

made up my mind of which side I really subscribed to. Anyway, So we get this deadline set for this idea of going back to the moon. The vehicle, the Orion spacecraft, was supposed to be ready by twenty fourteen, and then you had the goal of actually getting people back on the Moon by twenty twenty. It is twenty twenty, and

spoiler alert, that ain't gonna happen this year. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin unveiled this plan in two thousand and five, and that included a plan for two new rocket systems that would provide the umph needed to get the Orion spacecraft out into space on its way to the Moon or the International Space Station. And those rockets were the

ARES one and the ARES five launch vehicles. No two in three, just one in five, and they were or four, i should say, but one in five were also meant to kind of mirror the Saturn one and Saturn five rockets that were used in previous NASA programs. ARES one was the smaller of the two rockets. That one was intended to launch payloads like the Orion spacecraft and its crew into orbit. The ARES five would be a heavy lifting rocket and it would be used to launch significance

amounts of a payload into space of cargo. So if you wanted to create say a Moon station, you know, to actually build a station on the Moon, you would use a series of ARES five rockets to launch those payloads into space, and then presumably you would find a

way of getting them to the Moon for construction. So it's not that different from models like SpaceX, where they have the Falcon nine rocket or launch vehicle that can send a capsule into space, or the Falcon nine Heavy, which is meant to push much heavier payloads into space. Developing the rockets would be another really big task on top of building this Orion spacecraft. But this was a

thing that Griffin thought was necessary. Lunar missions are going to require a lot of support systems in order to make sure the astronauts can get to the Moon, they can land there, they can operate on the Moon, and then they can return from the Moon safely back to Earth. That requires a lot of work. So according to NASA estimates, relying on older launch vehicles like the Delta or Atlas rockets would require many more launches to get the required

equipment back into space. So that would drive up the cost of the program. And Griffin was saying, well, it's going to cost a huge amount of money to develop new rockets, but it will cost another huge amount of money if we rely on older rockets, because we we'll have to use more of them. And so he was weighing those two options and ultimately decided that it made

more sense to push for brand new launch systems. Now spoiler alert, this whole plan that was laid out in two thousand and five did not pan out, at least not as Constellation had laid it all out. We didn't have a spacecraft ready in time, nor are we ready to put anyone on the Moon this year. And one of the main contributors to the shortfall was down to budget. The original Apollo program had a budget of twenty five point eight billion dollars from nineteen sixty to nineteen seventy three.

If we adjust that for inflation and look at it in today's money, that would come out to about two hundred sixty billion dollars, a truly princely sum. But that was across the entire lifespan of the Apollo program, not just one particular year. In nineteen sixty six, the peak year the Apollo program. From a vedgetary perspective, the agency spent the equivalent of forty seven point eight billion dollars in today's money, and that was just for the Apollo program.

So the budget for all of NASA in two thousand and five, not just Constellation, but all the programs that NASA oversees was fifteen point six billion dollars. That's a lot less than forty seven point eight billion. Trust me, I ran the math. Even adjusted for inflation, that comes out to just under seventeen billion dollars. It is an enormous amount less than what was spent in nineteen sixty six, or the equivalent of what was spent in nineteen sixty six.

And yet Griffin was describing Constellation as Apollo on steroids. So that got a lot of people asking, can you really design Apollo on steroids if you're using a budget that's less than half of what Apollos program spent in nineteen sixty six. So this was a question that a lot of people were asking, and ultimately the answer appears to be no, you can't really do it. So despite having access to less money, NASA still really tackled this challenge. I mean, a lot of people poured a ton of

work and effort into trying to make this happen. In two thousand and nine, the agency released a statement saying the Orion would not be ready for a twenty fourteen launch. They were hoping that they could maybe make it a twenty fifteen deadline. But here's the thing. While on the surface that says, oh, it's a delay of just one year. That's actually not that bad, especially when you consider the budgetary restraints. It actually was three years later than what

Griffin had been hoping for. He had hoped to have the Orion ready for launch by twenty twelve, so now they were sure it wasn't going to be ready till at least twenty fifteen. The agency was really trying to narrow a gap that was going to exist when the space shuttles retired and the USA would no longer have a spacecraft capable of launching and docking the newly finished International Space Station, So the ISS gets finished around twenty ten at the same time the space shuttle program retires.

Now the USA is reliant on other countries and their space program in order to get astronauts to and from the space station, typically Russia, so that's not ideal, and they were waiting on commercial space companies like SpaceX to catch up, but that just hadn't happened yet. So the real hope was that the Orion spacecraft could take over those duties and make USA independent of other countries and also of commercial spacecraft companies, where NASA would be owning

and operating these vehicles. But that just wasn't going to happen. That gap was going to get wider and wider, not narrower. NASA did have a cost overrun of three point one billion dollars, though again this was much less than what the agency spent during the Apollo program years. But that delay of the program and the twenty six percent overrun in costs gave Constellation a really bad reputation. That was a reputation that President Barack Obama actually referenced back in

two thousand and eight. NASA also predicted that the program would continue to cost more than had been originally projected, with an increase of about one hundred and forty percent of the original budget marked out for the years between twenty ten and twenty fourteen, not great news. On top of that, the focus of NASA was almost entirely on the Orion spacecraft and the Areas One launch vehicle. Again

no big surprise here. The idea of sending people to the moon is generally one that people really get excited about, and excitement translates into governments approving bigger budgets because you know, representatives want to support the things that their constituents are really excited about. But that meant that the ARES five rocket, the heavy lifting rocket, had a much smaller development budget.

All the focus was on the crude stuff the Orion crew doesn't see rewed the Orion spacecraft and the ARES one launch vehicle, not the ARES five, but the AREAS five was going to need a lot of money. I mean,

this was a heavy lifting rocket concept. But that meant that because it didn't get that big budget, the development was getting delayed over and over again, and that led to a point where analysts believe that based on the budgetary trajectory at NASA, the earliest the ARES five rocket would be able to launch the lunar landing hardware that would be necessary to actually land on the Moon would be sometime in the twenty thirties, if that were at

all possible even then, so that would delay that deadline of landing on the Moon by more than a decade. The idea here was that the Space Agency would put a lunar landing spacecraft into Earth orbit, and it was to be called the Lunar Surface Access Module or el SAM. Later it was renamed the Altair, and an ARIS five would launch this Altair into Earth orbit. Because it was heavier than the Orion spacecraft, so you wouldn't want to use like an ARES one rocket, you need the heavy

lifting rocket. There a separate areas. One rocket would launch an Orion spacecraft into Earth orbit, and then the Orion spacecraft would rendezvous with the orbiting Altair. The two would dock and then together they would make the rest of the trip to the Moon. Upon entering lunar orbit, the two spacecraft could separate. The entire crew of the Orion could move over into the Altair because the Orion would be automated and it would just remain in orbit around

the Moon. Then the Altair would land on the Moon. The astronauts would go out and you know, do moon stuff. Then they would come back to the Altair, launch off the Moon, back into orbit, dock with the Orion, transfer back over to the R spacecraft, and then they could make the trip back to Earth. But because of these budget limitations, the focus on the Orion and the ARES IE vehicles meant that all of this other stuff, the ARES five and the lunar module, all of that just

remained hypothetical. It was a proposal, not an actual spacecraft. So while the agency might have produced an Orion spacecraft, in time to get into space. By twenty fifteen, there was just no hope of making enough progress to land on the Moon any earlier than the twenty thirties, and some people thought that even that was too ambitious. Meanwhile, NASA, the agency was struggling with budget constraints in general, not just for the Constellation program. Sometimes one project would have

to siphon funds intended for a totally different project. You had a lot of internal battles in NASA as different project leads would kind of squirrel budgetary money away that was intended for some other project for their own. That did not help morale in the game agency. And moreover, it was never enough to cover all the costs that were mounting up. In twenty ten, NASA received its new budget from the US government, and that budget listed zero

for the Constellation project. I'll explain more in just a moment, but we'll take a quick break. So why did the US government pull the plug in twenty ten on the Constellation project? Well, it's actually pretty complicated to answer that, but it comes down to several factors. So, for one thing, the design specs or the various components in the Constellation project had changed over time, some of them had changed

a few times since two thousand and five. The team made various determinations that then led them down different paths, requiring NASA to invest more in new technologies and new designs and launch craft. And the initial plan would have seen using them using more components that already existed right, that were already in production. But a lot of the decisions they made meant, oh, no, we're going to have

to actually make new stuff. So that meant that the process was going to take longer and also cost more. The prospects didn't look promising as far as achieving goals on time, so that was another strike against it. And you also had the case of a change in political administrations, which frequently shakes things up with government funded projects. In fact, that's one of the biggest challenges NASA faces with space travel.

It's not just the incredibly difficult task of designing technology capable of bringing people into space safely and back home again. It's dealing with a changing political climate that may have vastly different priorities than the previous administration, which in turn can mean that the funding you were counting on early in the project disappears midway through the project, and that just means it's the end of your whole process, not

a way to run a space railway. Right. So, in two thousand and eight, when Obama won the presidency, one of the things that followed was a change in NASA administrators. He and his advisors had a different set of priorities than the previous administration, which included dedicating more money toward commercial space companies like SpaceX rather than going down the traditional path in which NASA would contract with big companies

like Boeing or Lockheed. Griffin resigned upon Obama taking office, which in turn is not an unusual thing to happen when you have a change in administrations. It's not out of the realm of normal practice for administrators to resign. In those cases, it often happens. His replacement would eventually be Charles Bolden, himself a former astronaut, though it takes several months before Bolden would be appointed that position and

confirmed as the new administrator of NASA. These challenges are part of why the private space industry was able to get a foothold. Private companies aren't beholden to a government

for their budgets. Although a private company might find itself burning through its startup cash before it can become a viable business, and private space companies like SpaceX were becoming prominent right around the same time, which in turn created a chance to rely on those companies for key components rather than having them all be designed or contracted through NASA.

After a committee evaluated Constellation and determined that the program simply could not succeed given its very ambitious goals coupled with its very limited resources, the project got the axe. It wasn't necessarily that the project was bad, just that its reach was further than its grasp. NASA was to shift money over to long range goals such as developing new heavy lift rockets and propulsion systems to be used in space, all with an eye toward powering missions to

Mars in the future. The areas rockets and the Orion were scrapped, at least temporarily. Congress reacted negatively to these changes because, well mostly because they weren't included in the decisions. Obama amended his decision after encountering intense opposition from certain members of Congress, and he brought Oriyan back into the picture so it no longer was scrapped, it was now back on the docket, and he set a deadline for a new launch system to be ready to go by

twenty fifteen. Congress then took that plan and tweaked it by giving NASA the directive to repurpose the rocket designs for the Constellation project and have that ready to go by twenty sixteen. The new launch vehicle would be called

the Space Launch System or SLS. One of Obama's advisors said it was it was pretty clear that members of Congress were doing their best to keep contracts with big companies that had been involved in Constellation, indicating that this might have been some sort of you know, smokey filled

room politics going on here rather than technical discussions. One other goal in this era was to develop a mission in which NASA would send astronauts to an asteroid, again as sort of a staging ground for an eventual mission to Mars, and that's where things mostly stayed. During Obama's administration, NASA was working on developing these initiatives, and the private space industry began to grow at the same time. Now, ultimately that asteroid mission would get scrapped, but it would

stick around for quite some time. Now, when Donald Trump won the presidency, things would change again. So one thing you do often see with these changes in administrations is that a succeeding administration will attempt to set more ambitious goals than the preceding one. It's a way for presidents to kind of set themselves apart and to try and get the nation excited about some particular initiative. So Obama's administration was looking at the moon and asteroids, with a

further goal being Mars in the future. Trump's approach was similar in that it was Moon and then straight on to Mars. Now. I'm not going to go into all the budget details here except to say, despite the fact that you kept seeing these lofty goals in place, you didn't necessarily see an enormous boost in budgets at NASA, certainly nothing close to the peak that was spent back in nineteen sixty six with the Apollo program. The budget

fluctuated year to year. In twenty sixteen it was nineteen billion dollars, but a year later the budget had reduced

down to eighteen point eight billion dollars. In twenty eighteen, it would bounce back to nineteen point five billion, but it kind of hovered right around that area just under twenty billion dollars, and there's still political battles being fought around the subject of relying on commercial space companies like SpaceX versus going the traditional route where NASA lands contracts with specific big companies like Boeing and Lockheed in order

to build spacecraft. Wells typically play out with congressional representatives from states that rely on big manufacturing jobs, with those companies like Boeing and Lockheed arguing that the key elements of any mission should ultimately be owned and operated by NASA. Then others say that the financially responsible thing to do is to outsource this to commercial space companies, whom they argue can do the same work but for less money.

And a lot of these arguments come down to financial and political matters, again, not technological decisions, and it gets really messy. Tech is way easier to explain. In April twenty nineteen, NASA announced that the Artemis program and its ambitious goal of putting a man and woman on the

Moon by twenty twenty four would become a reality. Of course, we have to remember that elements of this plan had been in development since two thousand and five, But because the SLS is largely built upon the bones of the proposed Ares five rocket design. Heck, the Orion spacecraft, which will actually hold the crew of a NASA Artemis mission, has been the one piece that's been most consistently in

development since George W. Bush was president. In February twenty twenty, the document titled Moon twenty twenty four Mission Manifest made the rounds now. NASA has since disputed the contents of this document, saying that it does not accurately reflect the current state of the Artemis program. However, as of the time of this recording, it's the most recent version of

the plan I can find. Everything else is kind of gone dark, So I'll explain the manifest version of the mission here with the caveat that things have already changed. But this plan kind of gives us a peek into the ambition surrounding the Artemis program, even if the subsequent plan that will get announced probably right around the time this episode publishes, might have more details. So here we go.

In April twenty twenty one, according to this manifest, NASA would test a Block one SLS launch vehicle carrying an unmanned Orion spacecraft in a mission dubbed Artemis one. So that raises a question, what's a Block one SLS. Well, the SLS is designed in a way that will allow NASA to swap out elements further down the line to give it a boost in performance. Specifically, it will allow NASA to include more powerful boosters and rockets that are

intended to get a crew to Mars. But those are still being designed and constructed, and so we don't even have an example to point at for the more advanced ones.

And rather than wait on all of that to finish before making any other progress, NASA has placed a strategy in which an initial version of the Space Launch System Block one will be used to get the Orion into orbit, or to say, it to the Moon, and the future will get a more powerful Block two SLS that would be able to send the Orion and cargo to Mars.

So how does all this play out? Well, keep in mind that the Block two doesn't really exist yet, so things could change dramatically by the time we actually have something built, if it even gets built. The Block one SLS is the version that's currently being finalized now, and it will have two boosters similar to the Space Shuttle, and it will also have a core stage like a central rocket tank with four engines. The pair of solid propellant rocket boosters are really similar to what the Space

Shuttle used. In fact, some of the early SLS launch vehicles will be using unused Space Shuttle booster casings. Then in the future new casings will have to be made because we'll have run out of ones that weren't used in the space program. But the old Space Shuttle boosters had four segments of solid propellant rocket fuel. The Block one SLS boosters will have five segments the core stage. That central rocket will have four engines, and it will

use liquid propellant. Once in space and the Orion spacecraft separates from its launch vehicle, the Orion spacecraft will use what is called the interim cryogenic propulsion stage to travel to its destination, such as the Moon. This version of the SLS will be able to send fifty seven thousand pounds or twenty six metric tons of payload into space. In fact, it'll be able to deliver payloads of that size into orbits beyond the Moon now between Block one

and Block two. NASA also plans a version of the SLS called Block one B. It will have a little bit more oomph. The central core will have more fuel, it'll be a bigger fuel tank, and it will be able to put not just the Orion spacecraft into orbit, but an orbiting habitat up into space. It can lift a heavier payload up into space, creating opportunities for missions

and more ambitious goals. Block two's goal is to create a launch vehicle capable of putting forty five tons of payload into deep space and will be used for missions that aim to go to Mars. All right, so let's get back to this timeline that has since been disputed

by NASA. So, according to that original timeline, or at least the manifest timeline, NASA planned for the first crude Orion mission, The first mission to have astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft, which would be called the Artemis two mission,

would launch in January twenty twenty three. The mission will use a Block one SLS as the launch vehicle, and it would see the astronauts go on a path around the Moon and back to Earth, not landing on the Moon, but doing an orbit of the Moon and then returning or maybe not even a full orbit. I think it's just a flyby behind the Moon, similar to some of the earlier Apollo missions. In August twenty twenty four, NASA

plans to launch the Artemis three mission. This mission's purpose is to send a lunar lander to the Moon on a Block one bsls. More on the whole lunar lander thing in a bit, because that part of the plan has definitely changed a couple of times. October twenty twenty four is the big one. That would be a mission called Artemis four, and the purpose would be to send astronauts to actually set foot on the Moon, including at

least one woman. This mission would use a Block one SLS to send the Orion to rendezvous with a thing around the Moon's orbit. We'll get back to that because it has changed. It originally was just going to be a lunar lander. Now it's slightly different. And this does not end the Artemis program right The landing on the Moon is not the ultimate end of Artemis. NASA plans a few other missions. One would happen in September twenty

twenty five. This one is not technically an Artemis mission, but it will use the same spacecraft it'll use the SLS Block one in order to launch a satellite called the Europa Clipper, and this one would fly over to Jupiter and get an orbit around Jupiter and do flybys of Jupiter's moon Europa to get a closer look. And part of the purpose of this mission is to see if Europa has environments that could potentially support life, so

that's really exciting. Then in June twenty twenty six, NASA plans to send another mission to the Moon, this one designated Artemis five, with more astronauts visiting Old Luna, using a Block one B SLS to get there, so this is the slightly larger version of the SLS. The following June, NASA would launch a lander to head to Europa, giving us an even closer look at Jubiter's Moon because we'd have a lander setting foot, a lander uncrewed lander setting

foot or landing on Europa. But that would be super cool. In August twenty twenty eight, NASA, according to this manifest would plan to launch the Artemis six mission, which would once again take astronauts to the Moon, but this time aboard a Block one B SLS, And in February twenty twenty nine, Artemis seven would send cargo to the Moon and would be the first mission to rely on a

Block two SLS. August twenty twenty nine also brings us to Artemis eight, and that is also using a block to SLS to send people astronauts aboard and orion mission. I have no idea where that one's specifically going. It might be a mission to test the block two for a manned spaceflight mission in general, but maybe it's going

to the Moon. I don't know. The manifest was unclear, and the final two Artemist missions that were in that manifest included a twenty thirty one called Artomus nine that would be a cargo mission using an SLS Block two and an Artomis ten that would also use a astronaut led mission on a block to SLS. So that's what the manifest had laid out, which NASA again has disputed, saying that there are numerous errors or discrepancies with their current plan. But that's the most information I have as

of the recording of this podcast. It gives us a general idea of what they were thinking. When we come back, I'll talk about some other things that have complicated this But first let's take a quick break. As I record this, we're in a blackout on information about further details of the Artimist program, largely because NASA is in contract negotiations with multiple companies for different parts of this program. So there's a lot of details that haven't been nailed down.

There's nothing to share because they haven't decided which version they're going with on some of these things. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. But while we don't have concrete facts to talk about, we can at least go over what NASA has in mind. Now, I've mentioned the Orion spacecraft several times without really going into any real detail about it. Again, out of all the pieces for the Artemis program, this

one has had the most consistent support behind it. Since two thousand and five, the first Orion spacecraft has been completed in manufacturing. So it's something that we can actually talk about because there is one. It hasn't been used yet, but it exists. It has changed a few times since its original concept. The prime company responsible for building the

Orion spacecraft is Lockheed. Now lots of folks call Orion a gum drop shaped spacecraft, and to me, it looks really similar in design of the old Apollo capsules, but it's larger and fancier than those old spacecraft. It could carry more people. The Apollo spacecraft would carry a crew of three, the Orion is designed to carry a crew of four. A lot of the documentation says they could carry a crew of up to six, but NASA consistently

describes it as being a four person spacecraft. It is capable of traveling in space for twenty one days, or it can exist out in space for up to six months when docked with some other spacecraft like the International Space Station. NASA's plan is to crew the Orion spacecraft with four astronauts, though as I said before, it could potentially hold as many a six at least according to

most documentation I've read. The crew module, which is the bit that the astronauts will actually be in, is the part that looks like an old Apollo capsule, but bigger. It has three hundred and sixteen cubic feet of habitable volume.

The old Apollo spacecraft had numerous dials, switches, buttons, and screens all over the place, but the Orion has just three computer screens, and it distills all of those various technologies that were represented by those buttons and dials and switches into a computer controlled system accessible through on screen commands, which in itself is a pretty big departure and a

big bet. It's one of those things that makes some people nervous, the idea that you have these computerized systems and you question, well, what happens if something goes wrong? How do you take manual control of a spacecraft. I've already talked about the SLS, but there's a third part of that that we need to mention really quickly, which is what NASA calls the Exploration Ground Systems or EGS.

I would call that a launch pad. The SLS will use new ones constructed for that purpose, and the project will also make use of two new spacesuit designs. But rather than go into detail about those spacesuits, I'm going to save that for its own podcast to talk about the evolution of the spacesuit and how that has changed over the past few decades. To actually visit the Moon. NASA does have some other plans, and one of those

now is the Lunar Gateway. Before I was talking about a lunar lander that the Orion would have presumably rendezvous with around orbit in the Moon and then gone down to the surface. But things have changed since then. So here's how it's supposed to work. You have what is

essentially a lunar satellite or lunar space station. This not as big as the International Space Station, but a station in orbit around the Moon itself, and NASA would launch this in parts in several launches and then construct it in space around lunar orbit, and when finished, it should be the size of a studio apartment, according to NASA, capable of supporting astronauts for several months at a time

if necessary. Orion would be docking with this gateway satellite or gateway station in order to go to Moon missions, and astronauts would not stay aboard the Lunar Gateway all year round. Instead, they would just be there for the duration of a mission before departing in the Orion capsule to come back home, and you would have to occasionally or frequently send cargo up to replenish the Lunar Gateway.

From the gateway, astronauts would board a spacecraft that would be a type of transfer module, so they would dock their Orion capsule with the lunar Gateway, transfer over into the Lunar Gateway, get stuff ready for their Moon adventures. Then they would go over into this transfer module and that would detach from the Lunar Gateway. It would make its way to the descent point for the Moon's surface.

It would then separate so that you would have a descent stage descent module that would go down and land on the surface of the Moon. Astronauts would then do their thing on the lunar surface, using the descent stage as sort of a base of operations for up to two weeks. Then they would board the part of that module that would be the ascent module. So this is the part that actually launches back off of the Moon's surface,

leaving part of it behind. Right, So everyone piles into the ascent module, they launch, and then that puts them into a trajectory where they can rendezvous with the Lunar Gateway, dock with it, and come back to that studio apartment floating around the surface of the Moon. They could then continue work in the Lunar Gateway, or they could transfer over to the Orion spacecraft for the journey home. Now that part of the plan is largely being left to

commercial space programs. So this is really not a description of a specific piece of technology. It's more of a description of what NASA wants in order for them to be able to have these missions work. So it's more like, this is what the technology needs to be able to do, but we're leaving it up to various companies to present proposals on how they want to do that. So while

there's some concept art, it's all just a placeholder. These companies could each come up with very different proposals on how to achieve the same goal, and then ultimately NASA will select whichever one the agency feels is the most the perfect one for their mission. Hard to say the best, because things like not just the technological capability, but also the price factor into this sort of stuff. Anyway, honestly, that's pretty much where Artemis shakes out today. It's a

lot of placeholders. Even to this day that still blows my mind considering that the goal is to get boots on the Moon by twenty twenty four. But then we've moved pretty quickly in the past in the space race, and honestly, this might be exactly what we need to drive innovation. We'll be right back with more about the Artemis program after these short messages. So there are generally two paths you can take when you're making these sort

of big, big programs. One is you can work on the technology that you're going to need for space exploration, and then you can set a timeline based on your progress as you produce these pieces of technology. But that opens up the chance for projects to fall into an observation called Parkinson's law that's named after Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a British author, and Parkinson observed that work tends to

expand to fill the time available for it to be completed. So, for example, let's say I'm researching a podcast and initially I have a deadline of four hours to finish my research before I have to go into the studio, and that means it's going to take me four hours to complete that research. I've got it all planned out, I'm ready to go. I'm hitting the ground running. I'll be done in four hours. But let's say that something happens. Let's say that there's another podcast in the studio where

I was supposed to go in they're running late. Then I'm told, hey, it's actually going to be two hours later. Than what you thought. Now you have six hours to finish that research. Well, according to Parkinson's law, the work of that research will actually expand for that six hours.

That does not necessarily mean that the podcast I record is going to be longer than it would have been if it had stated its original studio time, or that'll even be better than it would have been when I was supposed to go in, rather than just the work itself expanded to fill in those extra two hours. So let's say we're working on a project and we're not sure how long it's going to take us to complete

this project, but we're supposed to give an estimate. So if we're conservative, then we'll give an estimate that's further out than what we think we actually need, and the idea being well, things are going to pop up, we're gonna have to deal with them. So let's plan for it to take twenty days, but we think it's really going to only take ten. Well, according to Parkinson's law, the work we're doing is actually going to expand to

fill up those extra ten days. So at the end we're going to say, boy, aren't we glad we said twenty days? Because it turned out that's how long we needed. But there's also the possibility that you could have completed it in ten days, and that you really just allowed the work to expand to fill that space. That if you had given a ten day deadline, you still have gotten the work done. There is a diminishing return here, though.

There is a point where you might give a deadline that's just too aggressive, right that maybe you say, oh, it's going to take us five days when you really think it's going to take you ten, and you're doing it so that you motivate yourself, but it turns out you've sabotaged the whole project because there's just no way to get it all done in five days. That can

also happen. So it's a delicate line you have to walk, right. So, Parkinson's law is really more about how we let time get away from us, or how we allow bureaucracy to play a large role in things, or otherwise bog ourselves down in the stuff that keeps us from getting the core work done. However, it does not mean we can set these arbitrarily short deadlines and then magically get things done faster. As I said, there is that tipping point

that you have to look at. NASA's approach is to set aggressive but potentially achievable deadlines that in turn sets expectations and the pace of work. It also gets people into the habit of looking at practical approaches. If the goal is to get people back on the Moon by twenty twenty four, what are the things that have to

happen in order to achieve that goal. If we're going to send people to Mars in the following decade in twenty thirties, what do we absolutely have to have nailed down to make that happen, Rather than just having feature come in where we say, oh, wouldn't it be nice if we also added this. By saying these aggressive goals, you kind of push feature creep to the side because you say, listen, our main concern is getting this to

happen by this date. The things that would be nice are out of the discussion because that doesn't contribute to what we actually have as our goal. So that's kind of what happened in the nineteen sixties to a large extent, and it does work as a motivating factor to a certain level. Now, besides, these timelines have to be aggressive anyway, because NASA can't count on having a budget sufficient for

achieving its goals from one year to the next. Definitely not between presidential administrations, and there's the potential for the presidential administration to make a big change in twenty twenty, so who knows what the next president might prioritize when

it comes to budgets. So if they set longer timelines, if NASA said, OK, we're gonna give ourselves more space, no pun intended, to get this stuff done, there'd be a lot more chances for things like budget cutbacks which would sabotage emission just as effectively as hitting some sort of technical or design challenge that would become harder to solve than you thought. NASA is moving forward with their goals that we're going to have to wait and see

if they actually are achievable. But in the meantime, the agency has opened up the application process for people who are interested in becoming astronauts. Right now, the US Astronaut program has about forty eight people in it. NASA needs more for this program to be workable, so it's possible someone listening to this podcast could be the first woman or the next man to set foot on the moon. To apply, you have to meet some pretty high standards,

which again is understandable. There are three general types of folks that NASA is looking for during this application process. They're looking for people who hold at least a master's degree in a STEM related field, so like engineering or astrophysics or something like that. They are also looking for people who are medical doctors. It gets more specific than that, but that's one of the three types, and the third are people who are certified test pilots. Those are the

three types that NASA's looking for. So if you belong to one of those three groups, you can look into the requirements that NASA has in place to see if you meet all the criteria. The application process includes an online component for the very first time, which, as I understand it takes a couple of hours to complete. I wouldn't know because I don't meet the initial criteria, but maybe one of you guys can find out. And we'll have to wait and see if Artemis actually gets people

to the moon. We just don't know if it's going to be possible yet. I have high hopes. I would love to see it happen. I don't know how useful it will be in the long term, unless we're actually able to use the stuff we learn on the Moon as a platform for learning how we can get to Mars. But it's definitely something that is inspirational and that alone

has value. You just have to weigh that value against other considerations, like risk and the other goals that you have with the agency, because NASA is doing obviously a lot more than just these programs, and you don't want to have a big, high risk, high payoff project fail like the Constellation project did and potentially set the agency backward. So it's a complicated thing, all right. So that was

the Artemis Project. I hope you enjoyed that episode, and I am working on an update to this where we're going to talk more about space suits, their evolution, and

why things got out of control. According to the Office of the Inspector General, the amount of money being spent on new spacesuits so far just the development costs have been around four hundred and twenty million dollars, and the office expects that another six hundred million or so would be spent before they were fully tested and ready to go, which means that more than a billion dollars would be spent on the development of these spacesuits, and that also

prompted some other folks to pipe up and suggest that perhaps NASA's approach is not the best way, one of those being Elon Musk. So I'm gonna do a follow up episode to this one about spacesuits in general and talk about what has been going on in more detail.

But for this one, I really wanted to revisit that whole story about the Artemis program to really talk about, you know, what are we trying to achieve in the first place, and then kind of see what elements are holding us back, because the space suits are just one of them, but it is one that definitively states we will not make that twenty twenty four goal. Barring some Deos x Machina kind of solution. Perhaps Elon Musk will produce spacesuits within the next three years that would be

fully tested and ready to go. I doubt it, but who's to say. Anyway, If you have suggestions for future topics of tech Stuff, let me know. You can reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is text stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.